


Songs for Schemers

by MaudlinScientist



Category: Better Call Saul (TV)
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-11-08
Updated: 2021-02-07
Packaged: 2021-03-09 04:00:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 8,656
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27458398
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MaudlinScientist/pseuds/MaudlinScientist
Summary: It shouldn't be possible to be so lonely and so wanting-to-be-alone at the same time.- A series of short Mcwexler stories, inspired by songs.
Relationships: Jimmy McGill | Saul Goodman/Kim Wexler
Comments: 23
Kudos: 49





	1. Another Form of Relief

**Author's Note:**

> It's been a long, long time since I've been obsessed enough with a fictional romance to make a playlist, and this is the result. Hope you enjoy.

_[Portions for Foxes – Rilo Kiley](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qtNV3pOqcjI) _

Kim sat on her bed with a textbook balanced on her knees, trying to concentrate on the words in front of her hard enough to block out the sounds of her roommate’s party thrumming through the wall.

Ashley had asked if it was okay before throwing the party, and Kim said it was fine—because it would be weird if she didn’t, because Ashley was a perfectly nice girl and it would be silly and petty to object to her having a few friends over.

Kim, it turned out, had severely underestimated the number of people who could fit into her apartment. Judging by the sound of it there was an army out there, their overlapping voices merging into a white fuzz of noise. Occasionally, a surge of laughter rose up over the rest of it, a brief bright jangle of sound.

_How long has it been since I laughed?_

The thought hit her like a falling rock. Oh God, she bet it was at a movie. A movie she watched alone. The last time she laughed with other people… she was pretty sure that hadn’t happened since Nebraska.

And so she put her book to the side and went out into the party. Ashley was in a clump of people including a few Kim vaguely recognized—UNM law students like both her and Ashley. The easiest thing would probably be to join that conversation, but Kim had a vision of herself just silently standing there while they all talked and laughed around her, and looked around for somewhere she could sit down. There was a spot open at one end of the couch, and so she perched there, at the very front edge of the seat, her back straight and her hands in her lap. Now that she was in the center of the party sounds, the voices and laughter, she could almost feel them vibrating off her skin.

It shouldn’t be possible to be so lonely and so wanting-to-be-alone at the same time.

“Hey!” exclaimed a male voice.

Kim turned to the guy beside her on the couch. He was biggish, broad-shouldered, with short light hair. Probably good-looking, if Kim considered it objectively, though it didn’t help his looks that his face was flushed red—he had to be several drinks deep. With a sinking in her stomach she realized that she recognized him, and a moment later recognition flared in his eyes as well.

“You’re the mailroom girl!” He spoke even more loudly than necessary to be heard over the general noise level.

He was a first-year associate at HHM (Andrew, maybe? Or Allen?) He must be here with friends who were still in school. “Hey” he said, “if you’re here… Are you at UNM?”

Kim pressed her lips together. “Yep.”

“I’m sorry I called you the mailroom girl.” He really did look sorry, drunkenness exaggerating his apologetic expression to a cartoonish level.

“It’s fine.”

“Oh hey! You must know the new mailroom guy!”

“New mailroom guy? I don’t think…”

“Maybe he hasn’t shown up yet, I dunno. But they must have told you he’s coming.”

Why would an associate know about someone who was _going_ to be working in the mailroom? “I’m sorry, I don’t…

“You really haven’t heard?” Andrew-or-Allen leaned forward, puffing hot, alcoholic breath. “It’s Mcgill’s _brother_.”

“Mcgill… as in Chuck Mcgill?”

“Yeah! And get this, he’s some kind of _criminal_.”

Kim held her shoulders still, kept herself from squirming. This was turning into gossip, and she couldn’t stand gossip. She hated how sticking up for the target made you the bad guy, the spoilsport. No fun.

Andrew-or-Allen kept talking. “It’s weird, right? Chuck Mcgill with a brother who’s a criminal. Seems like it shouldn’t be possible. Like, genetically.”

“Well genes surprise you sometimes,” Kim said, staring down at the backs of her hands.

He leaned back onto the couch cushion, eyes wide. “I’ve never met a criminal, you know?”

“Yes you have.”

“What?”

“Yes you have. You worked on the Jacobson case, right?” And because he _still_ looked confused, she continued: “He defrauded his shareholders for millions of dollars.”

“Oh yeah.” Andrew-or-Allen seemed to consider that for a moment before shrugging. “Well, you know. There’s criminals and there’s _criminals_.”

“Right.”

“So,” he said, stretching an arm along the back of the couch behind Kim. “What year are you? Because if you ever wanted help studying…”

Kim kept herself from rolling her eyes. “Thanks for the offer. Goodnight.” And then, standing, she went back to her room, with its wall between her and the sound of strange people.

_#_

On Monday, Kim arrived at work to find Burt showing the infamous Mcgill brother around the mailroom. He was younger than she had expected—at least a decade younger than Chuck Mcgill—with an awkward haircut and ill-fitting shirt.

“Kim!” Burt exclaimed when he saw her. “You gotta meet Jimmy.”

 _Jimmy_. Funny that that was his name, since he had a ranginess about him that reminded Kim of Jimmy Stewart. (What, she wondered very briefly, would he look like in a decent suit?)

Burt patted Mcgill’s— Jimmy’s—shoulder with the back of his hands. “Make sure you make a good first impression on Kim. She’s gonna be the big boss before we know it.”

“Oh yeah,” said Jimmy, grinning at Kim. “I can tell.”

He could _tell?_ What did that mean? “Good to meet you, Jimmy,” she said, and turned away, thinking she’d get started on loading up her mail cart for the morning rounds.

“And now she’s off!” said Burt. “See, I told you. She’s got a mighty work ethic, this one.”

 _A mighty work ethic_. It was the sort of thing which was technically a compliment but which, from someone like Burt, carried the slightest hint of judgment, a whiff of “no fun.” Kim pressed her lips together and nodded.

That afternoon, she took her daily smoke break a little earlier than usual. She was leaning against the cement wall of the parking garage, dragging on her cigarette, when she heard the elevator doors open.

“Hey.” It was new-guy Jimmy, with a pack of cigarettes in his hand. “I asked Burt where I could smoke and he said down here.”

Kim had no right to object to him being there. She had to hope that he also saw smoke breaks as a chance for a few minutes of quiet, that he would respect the concrete-smothered hush of the garage.

Or maybe not.

“So normally I’d play the do-you-know game,” he said as he leaned back against the wall next to her, pulling out a cigarette. “But nobody here knows anyone I know. Except Chuck, and I already know you know him.” He took a lighter out of his pocket and flicked the flame on. “What’s he like, by the way? I mean, in a work setting.”

She glanced over at him, but didn’t turn her head. “Mailroom workers don’t _know_ the founding partners of the firm. I’ve seen him once or twice.”

“Ah. Sorry, don’t know how this type of place works. I’ve had a boss before but never a boss’s boss.” He raised his lit cigarette to his mouth. “It’s weird thinking of Chuck as the over-boss. Some part of my mind thinks of him as eternally eighteen, you know? I guess I don’t know if you know. You got brothers?”

She shook her head. “Growing up I always wanted a sister.” It was something she’d said before when the subject of siblings came up—just one of those little pieces of small-talk that Kim kept ready in case she needed something to say.

“Why?” asked Jimmy.

Kim blinked. “What?”

“Why did you want a sister?”

He was looking at her with one eyebrow raised in a funny-but-not-ironic expression that, for some reason, made Kim want to give him an actual answer.

“Because I wanted to have a friend without having to _make_ friends.” Even before she finished saying it she realized she’d made herself sound like some freakishly-isolated Boo Radley child.

But Jimmy just smiled. “For some people it’s probably like that.” He took a drag of his cigarette and then breathed the smoke out so that it curled up over his grin. “Well, Kim—what’s your last name?”

“Wexler.”

“Well, Kim Wexler, you don’t have to make friends with me. I’ll make friends with you instead.”

#

It wasn’t that Kim had been bored at work before. It was a point of pride for her that she never _let_ herself be bored. If you concentrated on your work, if you kept in mind why it needed to be done, if you performed every task, no matter how simple or repetitive, as correctly and efficiently as possible, then boredom couldn’t find a way in. 

Still, once Jimmy Mcgill showed up and decided to “make friends” with Kim, work became, on occasion, better than un-boring.

Over shared cigarette breaks and lunch breaks and brief just-happened-to-run-into-each-other moments in the middle of the workday, Jimmy told jokes and quoted movies and asked Kim about her classes. Outgoing people tended to make Kim tired, but that didn’t happen with Jimmy, perhaps because she never felt like she needed to impress him. He never seemed to judge her for not speaking to fill a silence, but when she did speak he listened with an intentness she wouldn’t have expected from someone with his jittery energy. She didn’t feel pressured to be funny around him, but when she _was_ funny he always noticed.

After “Why did you want a sister?” on the first day they met, Kim didn’t tell Jimmy much about her past, only that she was from Nebraska and came to New Mexico because of UNM and HHM’s student loan program. Jimmy, for his part, never said a word about his adult life in Illinois. Instead, he told stories about his childhood and adolescence that made him sound mischievous but adorably innocent, like a Chicago-fied Dennis the Menace. Kim suspected that wasn’t a complete picture, but the stories were funny enough that she didn’t care.

It was the perfect work friendship—light, un-pressured, pleasant.

It was months after Jimmy showed up before Kim saw him outside of HHM. That day, a Friday, the mailroom guys—Jimmy, Burt and Hal—decided that they were going out drinking after work. It was something they’d done a couple times before, and they always invited Kim, who always turned them down. This time, though, when she said she needed to get home and study, Jimmy gave her a lop-sided look that said, “Do you really?” And the truth was that she didn’t; there was nothing due on Monday for once.

And so Kim ended up in a booth with slightly-sticky brown plastic seats, nursing a drink as she listened to Jimmy entertaining the other guys. She had to admit it was more fun than her typical Friday night. Burt, it turned out, was a lightweight, and left to go home after less than an hour. Not long after that, Hal went to the bar to get another round of drinks and never came back.

“Should we rescue him?” asked Jimmy, pointing to where Hal perched on a barstool chatting with a redheaded woman.

“Well,” said Kim, slowly. “He’s obviously in serious danger.”

“Obviously.”

“But he does need to learn to handle dangerous situations on his own.”

“Right.” Jimmy nodded. “If we swoop in and save him, how will he ever get tough?” He smiled at her, and she felt herself smiling back.

Something inside Kim shifted.

She enjoyed talking to Jimmy so much because their conversations were always light, relaxing. But here, in these sticky seats, under this yellow light, surrounded by the hum of a dozen strangers’ conversations, there was something else. Something light but also… warm.

Maybe it was just the alcohol buzzing the edges of Kim’s brain. Or maybe it was that enough light conversations build up to something heavier, that jokes and movie quotes lay down layers like sediment on the inside of your chest until one day you see someone smiling and it makes you happy because it’s _them_ smiling. It was a nice feeling, but one she hadn’t planned on, and she wasn’t sure… 

Jimmy was still talking. “That’s the problem with kids these days. They’re too soft.”

“ _That’s_ their problem?”

“Everyone, before they get out of adolescence, needs at least two solid toughening experiences. They need to be brutally rejected—you know, romantically—and to be punched in the face. That’s the only way we’re gonna survive as a society.”

Kim squinted. “Are you implying _you’ve_ been punched in the face?”

“What, you think I haven’t?”

She shrugged. “You have… non-violent energy.”

“True, but that doesn’t mean violence hasn’t been done _to_ me. Which is what’s important for toughness, as mentioned earlier.” He paused, and she noticed that he was wavering slightly in his seat—the alcohol was beginning to get to him too. He raised a finger, pointing at the ceiling. “Once.”

Kim waited for him to go on. 

“I was punched in the face once. When I was eighteen, by my girlfriend’s brother.”

“Oh? What did you do to deserve that?” 

She thought the joke of it was obvious, but Jimmy squirmed in his seat, looking defensive. “Nothing! It was because we thought she was pregnant.” The moment the words were out of his mouth he froze, flushing red. He looked down at his hands, and when he spoke again his voice was much lower, hard to hear over the bar-noise. “She wasn’t though.”

Kim felt a rush of sympathy for him—he had revealed something more personal than he intended. “I had a boyfriend in high school,” she said.

Jimmy looked back up at her, maybe wondering what her point was.

Her point was that she felt the urge to share something personal about herself, to balance things between them. “Anyway, he once asked me—and this is after we’d been going out… a while? A year? Anyway, he asked, ‘Do you even like me?’ and I said, “I like you fine.’”

Jimmy laughed. “ _Ouch_.”

“I mean, it was true. I did like him. He was nice, he was—" She waved a hand in the air, looking for a word.

Jimmy, smirking, supplied her with one. “Adequate?”

And Kim couldn’t help it, she laughed too.

“I’m just imagining the romantic comedy poster,” said Jimmy. “There’s the pretty boy and the pretty girl, and in big letters ‘I Like You Fine.’ That’s the title. And then the tagline—” He raised his hands in front of him as if to suggest an invisible poster hanging in the air “—a perfectly adequate love story for the ages.”

Kim pressed a hand to her mouth as if she could physically push her laughter back inside herself. “I felt really bad about it,” she said once she had suppressed her giggles. “For a long time.”

“Why?”

“What do you mean ‘why’? Because when someone wants something from you, you feel like you should give it to them.”

“Do you?”

She shrugged. “I couldn’t give him what he wanted.”

“Maybe people should be giving _you_ stuff, Kim. Did you ever think of that?”

“No,” she said firmly. “I did not.”

“Well, you should. You should get everything you want.”

He smiled at her, and she felt herself smiling back.

Tentatively, she stretched out her feet to touch his beneath the table. It was silly, juvenile, how hesitant she was. They were adults, Jimmy was in his thirties for God’s sake, it was ridiculous for their shoes pressing together to make her breath catch in her throat. But from the brief look of surprise on Jimmy’s face, followed by an even briefer flash of something that she couldn’t quite identify…

That night, Kim dreamed that she was in her car, driving down a long Nebraska highway on the way to her new life in New Mexico. When this really happened she had been alone, but in the dream Jimmy was there in the passenger seat. He put his hand on her leg, and she wanted to look at him but she had to keep her eyes on the road, always on the road. And so she felt the warm pressure of his hand moving farther and farther up the inside of her thigh while all she could see was the highway stretching forward, the hills, the wide sky so blue it burned. 

#

The most obvious thing that changed about Kim and Jimmy’s friendship, after that night, was its geographic boundaries. No longer confined to the walls of HHM, they’d go out for their lunch break, or to dinner in the gap between work and Kim’s classes. Some weekends, if Kim wasn’t too busy, they’d see a movie. It amounted to no more than two or three more hours a week spent together, but those hours were light and bright and easy.

The first time Jimmy came to her apartment was on a Saturday when she’d canceled movie plans to finish an assignment. A couple hours after they were supposed to meet up, he called her. “You have to be tired out from all that brain work, right? Let me bring you a pizza.”

If Ashley were around she probably would have said no. She didn’t like the idea of someone else hearing whatever she and Jimmy said to each other.

But Ashley had recently started dating (of all people) Andrew, the HHM associate who had first told Kim about Jimmy, all those months ago at the party. Ashley spent almost every night at his place, which Kim assumed must be much nicer than theirs.

(Someday, some not-even-that-distant day, Kim would be an associate. She would get herself a nice apartment where she could live without a roommate, some place with a bathtub and a balcony. She would hang up paintings and cowboy movie posters. She would go to a furniture store and try out every single couch and buy the most comfortable one.)

So Jimmy came over and they ate on the couch, Kim backed up against one of the armrests with her feet up on beside her. The entire time, though, something seemed off. Jimmy’s lightness and brightness seemed forced. A few times she noticed him staring off into the air, as if trying to remember something, though whenever she spoke he snapped instantly to attention. 

They finished off the pizza, and Kim knew that she really should ask him to leave—she had things to do. But she didn’t want to be responsible and productive. She wanted to know what was wrong. “Jimmy, is there something…” She shook her head. “Never mind.”

“What?”

“It just seems like you’re thinking about something.”

“Does it not normally seem like I’m thinking about things?”

“You know what I mean.”

Jimmy leaned forward with his hands on his knees, staring down at the dingy tan carpet between his feet for what seemed like a long time. “I came here to turn my life around, you know?” he said at last.

Kim nodded, though really she only sort of knew.

“But it’s like I got stuck on the turn. And now I don’t know how to get to the next bit.”

She thought through that for a moment before asking, “Well, do you know what you want ‘the next bit’ to be?”

Jimmy let out a little huff of breath, an almost-laugh. “No.”

“Then that’s probably the first step.”

He looked at her, looked away from her, finally settled on _half_ -looking at her, his eyes seeming to focus on where her hair fell over her ear rather than on her face. “I don’t know, Kim. I want something _else_. I want something _better_.” He sighed. “I’m not explaining it well.”

She bit her lip, thought of things she could tell him about wanting else and better. Instead she said, “I know exactly what you mean, Jimmy.”

Kim felt the sudden urge to lean forward and push his bangs back off his forehead. But that seemed like too much, somehow, so instead she reached out with her feet, just like she had months ago at the bar. She pressed her bare toes between his thigh and the couch cushion, feeling the warmth trapped there. He shifted his gaze, looking straight into her eyes again, and put a hand on her bent knee, the pressure of it passing through the thin fabric of her sweatpants. He rubbed a circle with his thumb against the soft spot between her bones, and it seemed as if she could track the sensation of it traveling up her nerves, some tactile illusion transferring that steady circling up her leg to the base of her spine.

 _It wouldn’t have to be a big deal_ , she thought. _It wouldn’t have to change anything._

The front door opened.

Kim snatched her feet back, bringing her knees to her chest and wrapping her arms around her legs.

“Oh hey,” said Ashley, coming in with Andrew behind her. “We’re just grabbing some stuff. We won’t be here long.”

“It’s fine,” Kim said tightly.

“And I was just leaving anyway,” said Jimmy, getting up. “Hey Andrew.” He nodded at the other guy as he passed by him and out the door. (Jimmy had learned all of the associates’ names much faster than Kim had after she started working at HHM.)

“Hey Jimmy.”

Andrew kept looking at the door for a moment after Jimmy had closed it behind him, then turned to Kim on the couch. “So are you and Mailroom Mcgill, like, dating?”

The tone of his voice made it sound like he was accusing her of something. She curled her toes up, uncomfortable with someone from work seeing her barefoot and in sweatpants. “We’re friends,” she said.

“Pretty good friends, looks like.”

“Why do you care?”

“I don’t! I’m curious is all. Just because you seem so, you know, together, and he… Don’t get me wrong, he’s a nice guy, but even without the criminal thing, he’s got kind of a skeezy vibe, right?”

A spark of fury flamed within Kim. She concentrated on keeping it contained, imagined pressing it down into a single hot point at the back of her head. “I don’t know what that even means.”

“It means skeevy! And, like, I get that his brother founded the firm and it seems smart to get close to that, but—”

Ashley grabbed his arm. “Andrew! Could you go into my room and get my bag out of the closet? The big blue one, you’ll see it.”

“Um…” And maybe then he realized that he’d gone too far with Kim, because he just nodded and disappeared into Ashley’s room.

“I’m sorry about that,” said Ashley. “Sometimes Andrew doesn’t realize what is and isn’t his business.”

Kim didn’t respond, still focusing on keeping her anger singular and small.

Ashley nodded, as if she actually had said something. “One thing though… Was he right, about your friend being a criminal?”

For a split second Kim’s single point of anger expanded to fill her entire mind. But only for a second. “If it’s not Andrew’s business then it’s not yours either, Ashley.”

“I know. I do. It’s just that when I was in undergrad there was this guy… He wasn’t, like, the big bad kind of criminal, you know? He dealt pot and stole stuff, and I didn’t like that but I ignored it because of all his good parts. And because I was kind of stupid in love with him.” She gave a small, embarrassed smile. “Anyway, he ended up wrecking his life and almost wrecking mine, and I wanted to say—out of roommate solidarity, you know?—I wanted to say you shouldn’t let the good parts of somebody distract you from the giant red flags. That’s all.”

Ashley followed her boyfriend into her room, leaving Kim alone.

#

“Forget your cigarettes?” asked Kim.

“Nah, I’m trying to cut down.” Jimmy leaned against the cement wall next to her, his hands shoved into his pockets. “The other day I realized I look older than my dad did when he was my age. Got me paranoid.”

And that meant he was down here to keep her company, no pretense of any other reason. She remembered how she used to look forward to her daily cigarette break as a chance to be quiet and alone, and found herself smiling—because alone was better than a lot of things, but it wasn’t better than this.

Without her even thinking about it the hand not holding her cigarette started to move—to touch his arm, maybe. But then she stopped, pulled her hand back to wrap around her own waist.

“Jimmy, when you turned your life around… what did you turn it around from?”

He blinked, surprised by her abruptly bringing up a topic they had avoided since meeting each other. “Kim… You must have heard how Chuck got me out of trouble. I know people talk about it.”

“People do talk about it. That doesn’t mean I listen.”

Jimmy shifted his weight from one foot to the other, not looking at her. “Vandalism.”

Kim considered that. “You had to flee the state because of vandalism?”

“I didn’t ‘have to flee the state.’ That was Chuck’s condition for getting me out of jail. I was in jail because of vandalism, yeah, except they piled up as many charges as they could. Look, Kim, the full story is… embarrassing.” He leaned his head back against the wall, looking up at the garage ceiling. “Maybe I’ll tell you eventually.”

 _Maybe I’ll tell you eventually_. How generous of him.

“What about before the vandalism?” she asked.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean what did you _do_ in Cicero? How did you make money? What was your life?”

“Kim, you never asked about this before.”

“Jimmy, whatever it was, you can tell me.” _No judgments_ , she almost added. But that was too much, too far. She couldn’t give up her right to judgment.

He looked at her then, meeting her eyes. “If you know, then you’ll see it. You’ll always see it.”

She understood his reluctance to tell her, she deeply did, but it also meant that he was drawing away from her—as surely as if he had gone into another room, put solid a wall between them.

Well, maybe it was better that way.

“Okay,” she said.

#

Kim dreamed that she was in her car, driving down a long Nebraska highway. Alone now, and in winter. Outside her windshield, the air was filled with shifting snow, and she had to drive so, so carefully or else she would slip and—

–And suddenly the car was gone and she was walking instead. Walking, and somehow also outside herself, above herself, floating in the cold gray sky. There was nothing but gray and white in the entire world, a world without heat or color. She knew that she would never reach the end of the highway, that she would walk alone until—

She woke up cold.

The sheets didn’t seem to have been warmed by her body heat like they should have. She curled in on herself and stared into the darkness until she saw phantom shapes, squirming patches of dark-on-dark that moved like drifting snow.

Kim slid out from under covers. In the living room, she left the lights off, navigating by the faint glow of the parking lot lights through the blinds. If the apartment had a cordless phone she could have taken it back to her room, but as it was she stood next to the couch with the phone receiver in her hand, glancing at Ashley’s closed bedroom door. She ran her thumb over the buttons, up and down and up and down until whatever was building up inside her crossed a line and she dialed.

When he answered, Jimmy’s voice was even rougher than usual. “Hnnn? What?”

“It’s me,” she said keeping her voice low.

“Kim?”

“Sorry I woke you.”

“Well as long as you have a good reason, I’ll forgive you.”

She considered playing along, coming up with some ridiculous reason for the call, continuing joke on joke until she felt warm enough to go back to bed. “Jimmy, would you…”

What did he look like at that moment? She’d never been to his place; she didn’t know what his bed looked like, or what clothes he slept in. All she could picture was his face, that look he got when he was waiting for her to say something.

“Would I what?” Jimmy’s voice fuzzed through the speaker. “Kim, whatever you want, I’ll do.”

She breathed in, imagining Jimmy breathing along with her in some dark unfamiliar room. And then, so softly she couldn’t even feel the air moving through her lips, she whispered:

“Come over here.”


	2. Permanently Black and Blue

[ _Bruises - Chairlift_ ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZQ9hLOHj8ag)

The morning of the bar exam, Kim bought Jimmy breakfast.

There were few other people in the diner this early in the morning, and they sat in a corner booth that was too big for just the two of them, on opposite ends of the shiny brown seat curving around their table. Jimmy stared down at his plate of pecan waffles and tried to will himself to be hungry.

“You know,” said Kim, setting down her coffee, “to get the nutrients out you need to actually eat it.”

He pointed down at the waffles, which were thick and blond and glistened with butter and syrup. “This has nutrients?”

“Pecan is a nutrient.” She leaned forward in her seat. “Seriously, you don’t want to go into the exam hungry. It makes it harder to focus.”

He breathed in the rich, sweet smell of his meal, and the anxiety threading through his stomach twitched again. “Maybe I need something lighter. Swap you for your bagel?”

Kim nodded, and Jimmy switched their plates. He took a bite of cream-cheese-slathered bagel, and indeed it wasn’t bad. Kim, meanwhile, dug into the waffles.

Jimmy liked seeing her eat. Not in a creepy way (he would have insisted if she ever noticed him looking). It was more that he liked seeing her take pleasure in an ordinary thing, something she didn’t have to kill herself to get. It reminded him of seeing her in pajamas, un-armored and comfortable.

And that got him thinking about the _last_ time he saw her in pajamas: on her nice new couch in her nice new apartment, and she’d looked at him, and he’d kissed her and pushed his hands up underneath her oversized shirt so that the soft fabric bunched in the crooks of his elbows when he slid his palms up the smooth skin of her belly to her breasts, and afterwards she didn’t meet his eyes as she said, _“Maybe we shouldn’t do that anymore.”_

“I’m sorry I wasn’t able to help you study,” said Kim, the real solid Kim in front of him.

Jimmy blinked as he pulled himself out of the memory. “Don’t worry about it. I know how crazy work’s been for you.” He did know: that’s part of what _“Maybe we shouldn’t do that anymore”_ had been about, after all.

“Besides,” he continued, “I won’t always have you there to help me when I’m a lawyer, right?”

She smiled and shrugged as if to say: _who knows?_

When he passed the bar, Jimmy decided, he’d tell Kim first, before he told Chuck or called Mom.

With Mom and Chuck, the joy of it would be in their surprise—look how much he’s changed, look how far he’s come, never knew he had it in him. But Kim never knew not to know he had it in him. She hadn’t been there when he was suspended from school as a kid, or when he was a teenager and the cops brought him home, telling his mother, “Next time he won’t be so lucky.” Kim wasn’t there when he got divorced, when he dropped out of college, when he got divorced again.

Jimmy had a chance to go the whole rest of his life without disappointing Kim. He would never have to call her from jail. She would never see him in a prison jumpsuit. She would watch him succeed, watch him build himself into a net-positive contribution to the world, and in turn he would see his new self reflected in her shining eyes.

#

He felt the exam going sideways, of course.

It was exactly like one of those nightmares he started getting after he dropped out of school—the ones where he found himself in a classroom taking a test, knowing that some malevolent authority had forced him back there, and he stared down at the paper in front of him while everything he had ever known about anything at all drained away and left his mind a perfect blank. Except this was real, and no one had forced him here. He had actually chosen to go back to school, had gone all in on this lawyer dream knowing it was gated behind the end-all-be-all of exams. What had he been thinking? Like he didn’t know himself at all.

When he finally got the letter with his results it wasn’t a surprise, but seeing the words typed out and official still hit him like a punch to the gut. He screwed the letter up and threw it away, and then only a few minutes later got up again and took out the trash so it wouldn’t be in his apartment anymore. After that he turned on his crappy little TV and sat on his bed, half-watching some sitcom.

Back in Cicero, Jimmy spent much of each winter spotted with bruises. Small bruises, mostly, the kind you don’t even feel unless you press on them, but sometimes he’d fall and land badly, give himself a deep, dark bruise that pulsed with pain beneath his clothes. With those bruises, he could think about something else and it would still ache, could watch TV and it would still ache, could get drunk or high and the ache would fade for a while but come back just as strong, and in the end all he could do was _feel it, feel it, feel it_ …

The next day at work, he stopped Burt as the two of them were loading up their mail carts. “Would you mind taking the East Wing?” 

Burt raised an eyebrow. “Trouble in paradise, huh?”

“What does that mean?” Jimmy snapped, though of course he knew.

“Well, no one else’s delivered to Kim’s office since she got it…”

“Paradise is fine. Paradise is green and full of sunshine and baby birds twittering in harmony. Just take the mail.”

Jimmy handed the East Wing mail off to Burt for the rest of the week. Without that daily delivery to her closet of an office, it was easy to avoid Kim. Still, every time he approached a corner in HHM hallways he caught his breath, and only breathed freely when he turned it and she wasn’t there.

He shouldn’t have told her—not about the bar, not law school, none of it. He should have kept his plans secret from her until they actually succeeded, just like with Chuck and Mom. But he had wanted to impress her, had wanted her to know that he would catch up to her soon, that he’d be joining her in the ranks of more and better. And so he told her. Not that it had worked to keep away _“Maybe we shouldn’t do that anymore._ ”

Eight days after getting his exam results, Jimmy came down to the parking garage at ten minutes to six to find Kim sitting in the passenger seat of his car.

“You left work early to set up this ambush,” he said as he slid into the driver’s seat, snapping the door shut behind him. “That must have been difficult for you. If you’re not the last one out the door every single day, how will the higher-ups know who to take for granted? Don’t worry though, if you hurry in right now you can pass Hamlin on his way out, make sure he knows you’re still there.”

Kim blinked. After a long, sharp pause, she said, “So are you going to tell me what I did to offend you?” The way she said the word _offend_ it could prick a finger.

“That’s not…” Jimmy rubbed a hand across his eyes. He let out a deliberately long sigh, hoping to delay long enough to think of something to say. He couldn’t think of anything except the truth. “I failed, Kim.”

“Failed?” She looked away for a moment, out the windshield to the dark cavern of the garage, then back to him. “You mean the bar?”

“Yes!”

It was as if every bruise he’d ever gotten had reappeared on his body at once, blue-black and purple-blue and thick as leopard spots. And Kim could see them all, could see right through his clothes to his damaged skin. The way she was looking at him, blue-eyed steady, she must see every time he ever fell or failed, whether she was there to witness it first hand or not.

Kim pressed her lips together, tilted her head to one side. And then she reached over the gear shift between them and rested her hand on his knee. (If every bruise he’d ever gotten on that exact spot were layered on top of each other, the knee would be pitch black.)

She squeezed very slightly. It didn’t hurt at all. And with perfect confidence, like it wasn’t an opinion but a prophecy, she said, “Next time you’ll do better.”


	3. Fresh

_[Fresh Feeling – The Eels](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1lJrxsGuDkM) _

Most of the time, when Kim and Jimmy went somewhere together, she drove—she was more comfortable in the driver’s seat. But this Saturday he picked her up in his shiny new company car, and she actually enjoyed sitting back and watching Jimmy as he navigated out of Albuquerque. He sat differently in the seat of this car than he had in his old Esteem, and it reminded Kim of seeing him in his new gray suits, the ones she liked because of the way they hung on his body but also because when he sat in the HHM conference room he looked like he belonged, and it was all going to work, she’d have Jimmy and her career too, in fact he was going to _help_ her career, it would all go together.

He was wearing old clothes now, jeans and a polo shirt, but he still looked new—or maybe the newness was in Kim as she looked at him.

“So,” she said, “are you going to tell me what this ‘outdoor adventure’ is you’re taking me on?”

Jimmy screwed up his eyebrows in mock-doubt. “Did I use the word ‘adventure’?”

“You definitely did.”

“Well, maybe temper your expectations _slightly_.”

“Never,” she said.

He shot her a look that made her toes curl inside her tennis shoes.

They stopped, at last, at a trailhead, Jimmy pulling into one of three paved parking spots. The mountains were between them and the bulk of the city, and their lower slopes were furred green with short, water-conserving trees. Around the trail, the space between trees was filled in with bleached-pale grass and twisted, spiny shrubs. Survivor plants.

“Behold the glory of nature,” Jimmy said, an edge to his voice.

“Yes,” said Kim, stubbornly. “Exactly.”

As they got out of the car, the sun was level with the tops of the mountains, and around them shadow stretched late-day long across the dusty ground. Kim hoped that meant no one else would show up at this trail today.

Jimmy opened the trunk revealing a pair of plastic grocery bags and a folded brown blanket that Kim recognized—it came from Jimmy’s office in the back of the nail salon.

“Jimmy, are we going on a picnic? That’s adorable.”

He smiled, a little sheepishly. “Yeah, so… When I said I was gonna take you on a ‘outdoor adventure’ I actually had grander plans.”

“Oh?”

“I was going to rent horses.”

She almost gasped. “Really?”

“But then after I told you I thought about it more and realized I’d just end up embarrassing myself. And so, yeah.” He shrugged. “Picnic.”

Kim grabbed his elbow, grinning at a sudden thought. “Jimmy, are you… scared of horses?”

He rolled his eyes. “‘Scared’ is a loaded term. But, you know, I prefer small animals. Like a fish. I could be good friends with a fish.”

She let go of him and peeked inside one of the bags. “Sandwiches with wine?”

“Sandwiches are what you eat on picnics, right?”

And so they had a picnic. They carried everything far enough up the trail so that they couldn’t see Jimmy’s car and then moved off the trail a little to spread the blanket on a patch of bare ground. They ate as the sun sank lower, drinking not-bad-but-not-great red wine out of a pair of glasses Jimmy had wrapped up in a sweatshirt to protect them through the car ride. By the time the food was gone, the sky was orange-gold, the mountains dark cutouts against it.

Beside Kim, Jimmy rested his forearms on his knees and looked out at the setting sun. The orange light on his face obscured the wrinkles around his eyes, making him look younger.

When Kim was a kid, Momma made fun of her for “acting like a grownup,” but she was always aware that she _wasn’t_ grown—that she’d seen almost nothing, that she had no power and precious little knowledge. “Feeling young,” was never a good thing, back then. You had to be old to feel young in a good way. And maybe it was the same with her and Jimmy—maybe they couldn’t have skipped ahead to this point back when they first met or any time since, even if she were less cautious and he less careless. Maybe they needed ten years of history for this thing between them to feel so fresh.

Jimmy must have seen Kim looking at him, because he turned to her, smiled, leaned forward. She expected a kiss, but instead he went past her face entirely and blew in her ear. She giggled and squirmed at the odd sensation, and then grabbed his face with both hands and kissed him herself. A moment later he was flat on his back and she was stretched out along him, on top of him.

She drew back a little and her shadow fell over his chest, outlined in the orange sunset light from behind her. (That light would be gone soon; the top of the sky was dark already.) There was so much she could say to him, years’ worth of unspoken things layered on top of each other like coats of paint. She picked just one. 

“This last year, after Chuck got sick…” No more words came out, and she licked her lips as if that could make it easier. “I’m sorry I pretended we weren’t friends.”

“What? Kim, no.”

“You were on the warpath against HHM, and I thought that I needed to…”

After she was sworn in, Howard took her into his office and gave her a long spiel about how “a _firm_ is just another word for a _community_ ,” and “when we invested in _you_ Kim, we were really investing in _us_ ,” and by the end it was clear he expected more from her than just doing her job well. He expected gratitude. He expected loyalty. And why shouldn’t he? They had given her all that money, and the loans were charity as well as business, which somehow meant she owed them even more.

“I thought I needed to,” she continued, “but I shouldn’t have.”

Jimmy shook his head. “Forget it.”

“Jimmy…”

“Forget it,” he repeated, stroking her shoulder. “It’s all new.”


	4. A Drunk in a Midnight Choir

[ _Bird on the Wire – Leonard Cohen_ ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BmPUu-rMpWA)

“I think there’s just one more box in there,” said Jimmy, glancing back at Chuck’s house. “I’ll grab it.”

Kim nodded. She hadn’t said anything since her speech to Chuck, defending Jimmy. Remembering that—how she’d defended him—made him feel somehow hollowed out and filled up at the same time. _“I know he’s not perfect,”_ she’d said while standing up for him, standing on his side. He wanted to reach out and touch her, but that would have to wait until their job here was done.

And so he went back into the hot, dark haze of the house. Chuck was still in his study. He’d pulled his chair back into the corner and was sitting once again wrapped in his space blanket, watching in case Jimmy tried to steal or sabotage or break something. He had his poker face on, though there was no way Chuck had ever played poker so really it was just his lawyer face, still as steel, communicating dignity while denying opposing counsel any access to his thoughts. The contrast between that expression and the stupid shiny foil blanket around his shoulders caused a small hot flare of anger in Jimmy's chest.

Jimmy shifted the last box of Mesa Verde documents to the edge of Chuck’s desk so he could get his hands under them. And that’s what he should have done, should have just picked up the last box and left. But instead he turned to Chuck and said, “You know, maybe I didn’t have to trick her into liking me.”

For a moment Chuck said nothing, just shifted his weight back in the chair so the foil blanket rustled. “Right, Jimmy,” he said at last, raising one gray eyebrow. “I’m sure you never lie to her at all.”

Jimmy’s chest tightened—with guilt, but not regret. Because he remembered Kim’s happy, half-disbelieving laugh when she told him she’d gotten her client back, and then how she’d stood smiling up at him in the soft light of his lie.

When you sense the lie that can shift the world to a better track, you tell it. If you see the trick, you play it. Of course you do.

“You ask for too much, Jimmy,” said Chuck.

Probably Jimmy was supposed to reply with _“What does_ that _mean?”_ , but he didn’t because that wasn’t the situation here, Chuck wasn’t the teacher and Jimmy wasn’t the student and he wasn’t going to participate in some Socratic-Method lesson on his own flaws. 

Chuck went on anyway. “You want to break any rule you feel like but never be judged for it. You want to skip steps in everything you do and still be universally respected. And when you don’t get all of that you feel _aggrieved._ As if to ask you to _earn_ anything at all is itself some great injustice. So yes, it does baffle me that Kim Wexler of all people continues to indulge you— _she_ knows the value of earning your own way.”

“Oh?” said, Jimmy, tilting his head forward. “Like she earned Mesa Verde?”

Chuck just shrugged.

Jimmy finally picked up the box of documents, then, and left.

#

“I was expecting to find you asleep on your couch,” said Jimmy, standing in the doorway into Kim’s office.

She looked up from her computer, wiping a wisp of yellow hair out of her eyes—she’d been up for long enough that her ponytail was going slack. “Then why didn’t you just stay home?”

Because sleeping in Kim’s bed without Kim made him feel like a trespasser.

“Because I was gonna watch you sleep—in a completely non-creepy way, of course. Maybe whisper subliminal messages in your ear.” He waved his fingers in a way that hopefully suggested hypnosis.

She didn’t smile or joke about just what he’d like to whisper into her subconscious—just “Hmm,” and then, “How’s your back?”

“It’s fine. It’s holding up my head.”

The blue-white light of her computer screen highlighted the dark circles under her eyes, and Jimmy wanted to come further into the room, to walk around behind her chair and rub her shoulders. But this was one of those moments when he couldn’t be sure she wanted him to touch her, and so had to wait for her to cross the space between them instead. There had been plenty of those moments before, with Kim. Some lasted years.

“Kim,” he said, “it’s past one. Why don’t you just turn the computer off and lie down?”

“Jimmy,” she said, and sighed.

And that made him angry, that exasperated sigh, just like the ones she used to give when he told her HHM wasn’t good enough for her. As if just caring about her was some sort of violation.

“I _told_ you I’m good for my half of expenses, I gave you six weeks’ worth yesterday, so _believe me_ already and—”

“ _Jimmy_ ,” she said again, sharp now rather than exasperated, and of course that was worse. “You don’t tell me how to do my work—that’s why we’re not partners.”

He clenched his shoulders so hard his injured back twinged. “Is that why?”

Kim just pressed her lips together, and Jimmy turned away and headed towards his own office, wondering if it’d be possible to get any sleep in a rocking chair. But he heard her move behind him, the soft shush of her bare feet on the floor, and looked back to see her in her doorway. She leaned against the frame, the dark hollow space of her office gaping behind her.

“It’s so _I_ can’t tell _you_ how to do your work. That’s why we’re not partners.”

Jimmy nodded. “You regretting that? Not just telling me what to do, I mean.”

She shrugged. Not a shrug like she didn’t care—not at all like that. “You deserve to be yourself.”

He swallowed, suddenly overwhelmed by everything he wanted from her and for her. He wanted her to step out of that doorway and come to him and kiss him. He wanted to pay her back for every time she’d saved him. He wanted her to be successful, satisfied, well-rested, rich. “Kim, I…”

“I just hope… You deserve to be your _best_ self, Jimmy.” Her face was very, very still, and he found himself looking at her throat instead, watching the tiny tremor of muscles there as she said, “And sometimes I’m not sure...”

She shook her head. “I’m sorry, I don’t know what I’m trying to say. Maybe I really should go to sleep.”

Jimmy let out a breath he hadn’t realize he’d been holding. “Yeah, you really should.”

“Goodnight, Jimmy.”

“Goodnight, Kim.”

#

Jimmy pulled into a parking spot in front of the mall, and glanced up at the bulky concrete building through his windshield. The problem with mall architecture, he decided, was the lack of color. They were rarely even white, which could be colorless in an interesting, anything-is-possible way. Malls were almost always a flat light-brown—a boring, dead, desert dun. 

Irene Landry would be there, soon, and Jimmy would be ready to cross her path and then to lie to her.

Kim wanted his best self? Well, he had had that for a moment, for that brief, brilliant stretch of time after he left Davis and Main and before his license was suspended, when he had figured out how to have the freedom to do his work his own way while also doing good for Kim and for his clients, and all while making decent money. For a moment it had all gone together.

Now he just needed cash. Cash to buy time until he could get back there—to his best self, his best life. He could see the trick that would do it, and so he’d play it. He could sense the lie that would shift the world to a better track, and so he’d tell it. Of course he would.


End file.
